Obama's Catholic school comments are less substantial than his critics think.

Barack Obama is turning into a one-man gaffe machine. "Obama repeatedly called British finance minister George Osborne 'Jeffrey' at the G8 summit." Agence France-Presse includes this lovely deadpan observation: "The chancellor, 42, bears little resemblance to Jeffrey Osborne, a 65-year-old African-American hit singer-songwriter known for his 1982 classic 'On the Wings of Love.' "

Sky News called Jeffrey Osborne for comment, and he said: "I was really delighted actually. I was really not aware that [Obama] was that much of a fan that he would call the chancellor Jeffrey Osborne. Tell the chancellor when I come over I will have to hook up with him and we will do a duet of 'On The Wings Of Love.' "

Yeah, well, it's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. Earlier in the week, Obama made what the Scottish Catholic Observer construed as "an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland":

Obama . . . repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast's Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.

"If towns remain divided--if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden--that too encourages division and discourages cooperation," the US president said.

The president's words rankled on the other side of the Atlantic too. CNSNews.com tied them in with the ObamaCare assault on religious liberty, which America's Catholic bishops, rightly in our view, call "an 'unjust and illegal mandate' that violates the constitutionally guaranteed right to free exercise of religion" (the quote is from CNSNews).

On this point, however, it seems to us that the president's critics are overreaching. Considered in context, his comments seem to us the product of ignorance and parochialism rather than hostility toward Catholicism (or Protestantism, which he mentioned in a parallel fashion).

Here is the context, courtesy of CNSNews:

"Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity--symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others--these are not tangential to peace; they're essential to it," said Obama. "If towns remain divided--if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs--if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.

"Ultimately, peace is just not about politics," he said. "It's about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don't exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.

"And I know, because America, we, too, have had to work hard over the decades, slowly, gradually, sometimes painfully, in fits and starts, to keep perfecting our union," said Obama. "A hundred and fifty years ago, we were torn open by a terrible conflict. Our Civil War was far shorter than The Troubles, but it killed hundreds of thousands of our people. And, of course, the legacy of slavery endured for generations.

"Even a century after we achieved our own peace, we were not fully united," he said. "When I was a boy, many cities still had separate drinking fountains and lunch counters and washrooms for blacks and whites."

Note that Obama is talking--or attempting to talk--about Northern Ireland, a country that is unusual within Christendom for its recent history of sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants. His comments make a certain superficial sense in that context, whereas they would be completely out of place and objectionable in reference to America, where pacific pluralism is the rule.

ENLARGE

Obama in Belfast
Associated Press

Note also that Obama doesn't actually seem to know anything about Northern Ireland. Viewed in context, his comments are actually a homily about civil rights in America. His criticism of Catholic and Protestant "schools and buildings" is just a poorly thought out analogy: It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that while there's no good reason to segregate schools by race, there are differences in content between the education offered by Protestant, Catholic and secular schools.

We got a kick out of Obama's claim that "when I was a boy," segregation was the rule in "many cities." We suppose that's literally true, as Obama's birth predated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by just under three years. But Obama did not live on the U.S. mainland until 1979, when he was 18, making him just about as distant from the civil rights struggle as it was possible for an American of his age to be.

So he delivered a banal lecture on American history to an audience in a foreign country, idly analogized his own country's history to theirs, and in the process inadvertently insulted Catholics, a group he has already alienated by way of deliberate attacks. No wonder they call him the World's Greatest Orator.

Neoteny as Rhetorical Device We'd like to begin by thanking our parents and all the little people who helped us get to where we are today. That's right, we've won a journalism award. We are the proud recipient of the coveted designation "Ass Clown of the Week," bestowed by St. Louis's Riverfront Times.

Jessica Lussenhop, chairman of the Ass Clown of the Week Award Committee, explains the rationale for the award, which honors our Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed that was also the topic of yesterday's column. Here are some choice Lussenhop quotes (the first one comes right after quoting our op-ed):

Ugggghhhhhhh.

If you're not up for the brain hurtiness it takes to handle this we understand. There's a bunch of really great posts just below this one! Read those! . . .

Poor men. Poor, poor men can't even get their rape on in peace anymore. . . .

[Drew] Pusateri, [Sen. Claire] McCaskill's spokesman, tells Daily RFT that she is currently "considering writing a response" to Taranto and may we just say, oh, please, please, please.

Taranto is entitled to his opinion. We are entitled to ours, which is that Taranto is a troll and that anyone who thinks systemic sexual violence should be tolerated is a terrible person.

What's striking about this is that it's so childish. It's got name-calling, cutesy neologisms ("brain hurtiness"?), goofy repetition and witless sarcasm ("poor, poor men . . . please, please please"). Her very first word in response to our argument is nonsense: "Ugggghhhhhhh."

This is not atypical. As we noted yesterday, other critics engaged in name-calling and taunting that seems more suitable for a middle-school playground than an adult debate. One called us "a cockroach," which as we noted is classic genocidal rhetoric. But if you imagine her saying it in the voice of a seventh-grader, it doesn't seem menacing at all.

It all reminds us of an argument the anthropologist Ashley Montagu made in his classic midcentury feminist work, "The Natural Superiority of Women." Montagu observed that one trait separating Homo sapiens from other great apes is neoteny--the tendency of adults to resemble infants physically, especially in cranial structure. "The human female," he wrote," maintains the evolutionary promise of the fetal or infant skull more than does the male. The female is in the vanguard of evolution in this respect; the male falls somewhat behind."

We're not sure how well that argument holds up in light of subsequent developments in biology. But it does seem to us that "neoteny" is a suitable word to describe the rhetorical technique employed to such effect by Jessica Lussenhop and the Ass Clown of the Week Award Committee.

Bring Out Your Dead Yesterday we noted that a fanatical antigun group headed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg had included the name of Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev on a list of victims of "gun violence" it recited at a New Hampshire protest. It turns out the list came from Slate, where senior editor Dan Kois defends the decision to include the terrorist:

Yesterday, at an event organized by Mayors Against Illegal Guns in Concord, N.H., a list of names of "victims of gun violence" was read aloud. Today, one name stands out: that of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed during a shootout with police. The MAIG list came from Slate's interactive, "How Many People Have Been Killed By Guns Since Newtown?" The Atlantic Wire and others are asking: Should Tsarnaev's name be on that interactive?

Of course it should. The interactive is not a list of "victims" of gun violence--in fact, the interactive never uses that word, for this very reason. It is a pure accounting of deaths, provided, as our original partner in the project @GunDeaths notes, "regardless of cause and without comment."

That's about as disingenuous as it gets. The "interactive" may not use the word "victim," but it uses the word "Newtown," which conveys the same idea with far greater emotional force. If this were simply an exercise in objective presentation of fact, the question would have been framed neutrally--e.g., "How many people have been killed by guns since mid-December 2012?"

Keep Your Day Job--or Maybe Not Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is attempting to outdo Secretary of State John Kerry to become the world champion of botched jokes. BuzzFeed.com's Andrew Kaczynski has video from a Hagel speech at the University of Nebraska in which he responds to a question from "an Indian man"--presumably meaning a man from India, or of Indian descent--by quipping: "You're not a member of the Taliban, are you?"

Hagel "had previously answered a question on Afghanistan and negotiating with the Taliban before the exchange," Kaczynski notes. The Pentagon put out a damage-control statement: "Absolutely no slight toward any individual in the audience was intended. That's the last thing the Secretary would do under any circumstance, in this or any other setting. He didn't know who would be called next to pose a question."

There may be some truth to the stereotype that Republicans are stupid and insensitive.

Fox Butterfield, Is That You? "Internet Trolls Love Feminist Writers: The irony is that for all their misogyny, they spend an inordinate amount of time reading about women's issues"--headline and subheadline, Salon.com, June 19

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate "([New York Times reporter Margalit] Fox also identifies [deceased journalist Michael] Hastings' piece as a 'cover story.' It was not. Rolling Stone featured Lady Gaga on the cover of the issue containing 'The Runaway General.')"--Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins, Puffington Host, June 19

"C'mon, Do the O-Bots Really Want Meth Convicts Selling Sudafed and Toys Peddled by Pedophiles at Wal-Mart?"--headline, JewishWorldReview.com, June 20

"Just How Bad Could Atheist Grandma Be at Wedding?"--headline, Seattle Times, June 19

"Mad Men's non-consensual encounter between a young, frightened Dick Whitman and a prostitute didn't generate as much chatter as its gender-reversed scenario might have. Why?"--subheadline, TheAtlantic.com, June 18

Hugh Jackman's Close Shave "Woman Who Attacked Weight-Lifting Hugh Jackman With Her Pubic Hair Is Not Mentally Fit for Trial: Psych Eval." That's the headline of the New York Post story whose lead paragraph reads in its entirety: "No kidding!":

Katherine Thurston, 46, looked confused and disheveled wearing a black sweatshirt inside out as she sat at the defense table for the brief appearance in a Manhattan courtroom. . . .

The California woman is charged with felony burglary for allegedly barging into the "X-Men" star's West Village gym on April 12th.

Prosecutors declined to pursue the original misdemeanor menacing and criminal weapons possession charges involving the pubic-hair-filled electric razor she allegedly pulled from her waistband and flung at the actor.

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